A study- with newly interpreted evidence from his own writings and other sources- of the tragic brother of the gifted Bronte sisters, this throws fresh light on the dour background, the home life- less grim than usually pictured- and, unfortunately, the limitations of medical knowledge in handling Branwell's undoubted epilepsy. Largely, however, Daphne du Maurier has chosen to recreate the "Infernal world" which Branwell and Emily had made so much their own from childhood on that the Nagrian tales, as they are called, mirrored the overlapping of truth and fiction, of a lost identity, which plagued Branwell throughout his brief and tortured life. Failures contributed to his breakdown and at twenty five he faced an empty life, his paintings ignored, his writings inadequate, his health irreparably damaged by the use of drugs and liquor to alleviate the congenital weaknesses. This is an odd book for Daphne du Maurier to have undertaken, unless the weird fascination of the Bronte story found answering echo in her own attraction to somewhat morbid settings and themes. Her craftsmanship has made of the material something more than a case of literary research; almost one feels that she is unravelling a long distorted mystery. But it is unlikely that even her name will achieve for it the wide and sure popularity of her earlier work.
Pub Date: March 10, 1961
ISBN: 1844080757
Page Count: 295
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1961
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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